Various businesses handle a large volume of phone calls from clients or customers. To facilitate the processing of this large volume of phone calls, many businesses utilize technologies such as call centers. In general, each call center contains the equipment and personnel necessary to manage and to process a large volume of inbound or outbound calls. Inbound call centers receive calls, for example via toll-free numbers, from customers looking to obtain information about the goods or services that a company sells, to purchase those goods or services and to obtain assistance. Therefore, the inbound call centers provide support for incoming sales and for customer service requests. Outbound call centers typically contain a large number of salespeople making calls in an attempt to sell products or services. The same arrangement of equipment in a given call center can be used as either an inbound call center or an outbound call center.
Inbound call centers typically contain an automatic call distributor (ACD) to handle and route incoming calls. For example, the ACD connects calls to a sales representative, a customer service representative or a help desk operator among others. The ACD also facilitates automated routing of incoming calls to prompt the caller to select one or more menu choices and to place calls that cannot be answered immediately into a hold queue until the appropriate next agent becomes available. The hold queue provides the caller with music, advertising or periodic barge-in messages updating the caller on the current queue status. Responses to the menu choices facilitate routing of the call through the call center in the most appropriate way.
When an operator or representative becomes available, the incoming call is answered, and the representative agent assesses the caller's immediate needs and records relevant information about the caller in a computer accessible database. This relevant information includes caller identifying information such as account numbers. Once stored in the computer accessible database, the information can be accessed by any operator or representative within the company that has a computer and access to the database. Therefore, this information can be provided to operators the next time the user calls or can be accessed by operators or agents to whom the call is forwarded.
The saved information is typically made available to operators or customer service representatives on the screens of computers located in the call centers through a mechanism known as “screen pops”. In general, a database entry is created for storing the information about each client, and this database entry can be amended. For new incoming telephone calls, the identification of the caller, for example the telephone number associated with the caller, is determined, and this identification is used to populate a representative's computer screen with data that is already known about the customer. For calls that are transferred or forwarded within a given call center, successive operators can access some or all of the stored information by querying the database. However, each operator must have access to the database, and difficulties with database performance, availability, synchronization schemes and access controls affect operator access to the necessary information. In addition, when a call is transferred between administrative domains, e.g. from an initial call center to a distant call center, the problems associated with database access are exacerbated.
Current systems do not address situations where the caller dynamically provides data, for example details of a current problem, or current information to an operator. The screen pop systems only provide information that has been previously acquired and stored in the database. Current telephone communication systems do not provide session specific contextual information across termination points of a telephone call, in particular when those termination points span administrative or application domains. For example, when a telephone call is transferred from a first call center to a second call center, the contextual information is lost. Lost contextual information has to be re-entered or repeated by the caller. Repetitive entry of information is onerous to the customer.
Therefore, a need exists for propagating current and updated session-specific contextual information among various operators or representatives in one or more call centers, eliminating the need for repeated entry by a caller of the same information. The contextual information would be provided without having to access a central database and would be provided concurrent with the transfer of the actual telephone call.